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Friday, October 04, 2013

Up His Nose...

It's usually not a good sign when you see a group of 5th
grade boys surrounding a kid in the middle of the playground.

As I approached the group, I heard snatches of comments
coming from the group:

"How'd he do it?"

"It's almost out!"

"He really got it up there!"

"Here, maybe he can use this stick to get it out"

Me: What's going
on guys?

Kid: He put a
rock up his nose!

Me: What?

Kid: Yea! He said
he's done it before!

The circle opened to reveal "rock sniffer" bent
over at the waist gingerly picking at the left nostril.

Sure enough, I could just see the pointed tip of the rock
peeking out. It wasn't a smooth, rounded pebble but from what I could see what
looked like a small jagged chip of sidewalk concrete.

As to WHY he put a rock up his nose, his response was: "I
wanted to see if it could fit."

The kid wasn't panicked or crying, but his nose looked red
and tender as he continued his attempts to reposition the rock for a smoother
exit. I wasn't going to wait and see.

"Come on, Dude we're going to the office now and get
some help!"

Before we got more than a couple steps, he managed to
extract the rock. He was holding it up proudly so his friends could see it. It
was his next comment that made me wonder how this kid was going to survive his
childhood.

"I wonder if it will fit on the other side?"

(At this point I took his rock away.)

Relating the incident in the teacher's lounge, one of
the teachers who heard the name said: "Yep, I could have guessed."

2 comments:

I just subbed in a 4th grade room and while we were doing a read aloud and talking about schema one boy said "He has a sticker on his eye!" Originally I thought it was just on his eye lid, but when I didn't see a sticker I had him come up to me and show it to me. He had to pull a little on the skin below his eye and look up. Sure enough, a dime sized sticker was stuck onto his eyeball... At this point I was thankful for office passes so that someone else could make the decision as to how to get that out safely while I continued talking about things I know, like schema! When asked how it happened one kid responded, "he does things like this to get attention" and the other thought was that he was putting the sticker up to his eyelid and blinked and it got sucked in. Intentional or not, if he ever needs contacts, he'll be fine!